


Corvidae

by charade



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Angst, Drabble, M/M, Post canon, Sad Clowns, Tanabata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 21:03:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19731742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charade/pseuds/charade
Summary: Uta made Renji a birthday present. He isn't sure what to do with it.A fic for Renji's birthday and Tanabata.





	Corvidae

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Tanabata (7/7) and Happy Renji's Birthday (7/9) Have a very short sad pining clown fic. 
> 
> Some basic knowledge of the myth of Orihime and Hikoboshi will make the end make more sense.

Uta turns the figure around and around in his hands. He doesn’t know what its supposed to be. It’s too big to be a pendant, too small to really sit on a shelf. Too heavy to be a pin or magnet, much too light to be any kind of paperweight. Everything about it seems stuck in some kind of limbo. Maybe if he polished it more, sanded it down even further until it really shone, it could be nice by a window, to catch the light. He turns it over again, as if looking at it from another angle he’s seen a hundred times will give him the answer. But he likes the vague tarnish and rough edges, where the pour didn’t meet the mold perfectly. It gives it character. Substance. Some sense of reality in his hands that a perfectly smooth end product would lack.

He places it back on the desk. The little metal raven stares back at him.

“What are you,” Uta asks it, as if it will answer. It doesn’t, of course. He sighs and pushes his stool away from his desk.

The shop is a mess, even by his standards. When he’d just made masks, everything had a place and a purpose. It hadn’t been a system anyone else understood, but he had. It made sense, his mask shop.

This new shop, even if its still in the same place, even if it still has the same floors, same mannequins, same work desk, doesn’t make sense to him at all.

There’s a pile of scrap fabric in the corner and a half formed jacket draped on a shaping figure. Spools of leather and wire partially braided together. Some clay under a tarp to keep it from drying out, because he’s not remotely happy with what’s under it.

He’s not remotely happy with anything, really. Even the masks he still makes don’t end up right anymore. He stretches, flexing his fingers first, then his arms, his back, all the way down to his feet, but it does little to alleviate the stiff feeling in any of them. It’s the sort of stiffness he knows won’t release itself in anything but a fight.

The dull gaze of the little metal raven only seems to tighten them further. Uta buries his face into his palms and scrubs at it. As if he might just slide it right off. He could, if he wanted to. Maybe one day he will, just peel off this face of his and pick another.

Or none at all. Wouldn’t that be spooky. It’s an appealing thought, existing only as an urban legend, a figure with _no face_ who you see in the mirror, or standing at the end of subway cars late at night. Just a rumor passed around by teenagers on message boards. That sort of existence, he thinks, might finally make sense.

Rain taps at the glass of his windows. It’s still raining, then, even though it already washed away all the wishes of the city.

Even though it already stopped the magpies.

Even something as big as the dragon couldn’t really alter the flow of the Amanogawa. Even Souta-kun knew that. Even the dragon could not change the shape of the world. But maybe he thought it could be a more stable bridge than a flock of magpies.

But sometimes it felt like all it did was widen the river. Spit him back out onto the shore no matter how deep he had tried to wade in.

He looks at the little raven. They’re related, magpies and ravens. He maps out the changes he’d have to make to turn one into the other. Maybe if he’d made a magpie instead, smaller and slender, he’d know what to make out of it.

But it isn’t a magpie. It was never going to be. It could never have been anything other than a raven. He can’t make it into a bridge, like this, even if it hadn’t rained on Tanabata. He can’t make it into anything.


End file.
